Create a Balanced Lifestyle and Begin Living a Healthier, Happier and Enriched Life

Many people are not. Their lives are horribly out of balance and their quality of life is being severely compromised as a result. Some people do not even know what a balanced life looks like or how having one will improve their sense of well-being. They have become so stuck within their imbalanced lifestyle that they are not aware of how grave their situation is until a major crisis occurs and they are forced to take a good look at choices they have been making.

Having a balanced lifestyle means that you are putting enough time and attention into different areas of your life in order to feel a sense of satisfaction. Major areas of your life include:

• Career
• Family & Friends
• Significant Other/Romance
• Health
• Money
• Personal/Spiritual Growth
• Physical Environment

A good way to determine level of balance in your life is to rate your satisfaction and fulfillment in each of these areas on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being low and 10 being high). A person with a happy and balanced lifestyle will rate each area somewhere between an 8 and 10.

If your life is imbalanced then you may have some areas rated between 8 and 10, and others that are much lower. To create balance, you need to give areas with a lower score much more time and attention than you have been.

Imagine for a moment that your life is like a car and that each tire represents a specific area of your life. Now imagine that one of tires is beginning to lose air. You can drive on that tire for some time with no problems, but then one day you will discover (and rather uncomfortably) that it has gone flat. You will constantly feel thud, thud, thud of tire trying to make its way down road, AND if you don't stop, you will eventually wear tire right out, and driving becomes impossible.

Perhaps that tire represents area of ‘health’ in your life. Attention needs to be given to tire (your health). It has to be repaired and air needs to be put back into it before you can be on your way, unless of course you have a spare in back of your trunk, and you can fix problem quickly by just replacing it (ie. you just drink more coffee and eat more sugar to keep you going through day, and just take another pain killer or antacid when headache and stomachache get too bad). The old flat tire gets thrown back in trunk (and living a healthy lifestyle gets put on backburner).

If you don't get tire fixed right away (begin living a healthier lifestyle), it will begin to drain even more energy from you, because you know that you have to get it fixed, but don't. As time goes on, and you still haven’t done anything to fix tire, your spare will eventually get a flat as well (because you can only drink more coffee and medicate your problems for so long). This time, there is no spare tire in trunk to help you out and you are stuck along road of life without a vehicle to get you anywhere.

My question as a coach is: "Where in your life do you need to put more attention (air in tire), and if it already has gone flat, what can you do to repair it?”

Recent meetings of FDA were preceded by a petition from a leading consumer group, Public Citizen, asking that drug be taken off market. Both FDA and Public Citizen raised concerns about safety of Bextra, one of so-called Cox-2 inhibitors. The Cox-2 drugs Vioxx and Bextra were once viewed as “wonder drugs” for arthritis and painful menstrual cycles.

Bextra has moved into spotlight while maker of Vioxx is being investigated. Vioxx was one of nation’s most popular ways to treat pain and arthritis and was taken by an estimated 20 million people before it was withdrawn from market. That happened after studies linked it to a heightened risk of heart attack and stroke – information that may not have been fully understood when drugs received FDA approval.